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Calentita Press 3rd Edition
Are We What We Eat? Jennifer Ballantine Perera Often, when we consider food in a social context, we think of a good restaurant, perhaps even one we can recommend to friends, or of a favourite recipe, possibly one handed down through generations and a firm family favourite. Then there are the staples that become part of the culinary mix of any country, and dishes that become recognised as cultural markers of a particular community. Calentita has, for example, become one such marker of culture in Gibraltar - to the degree that every year we celebrate the Calentita Festival, which functions both as social culinary event and as a marker of the ethnic mix if not cultural hybridity found in Gibraltar. The diversity of foods available during the festival goes some way to explain how Gibraltar's cultural past surfaces in the present, and how we can, to a great extent, package this as a product to be consumed. At the same time, this very diversity raises a number of questions as to our focus on calentita as the national dish - why has calentita become such a marker instead of, say, torta de acelgas or calabacines rellenos, or fish and chips? Are we taking calentita too much for granted or, should I say, are we reading too much into calentita as a cultural signifier? As we walk around the food stalls at the festival we quickly realise that these consumables before us are a result of influxes and influences, of migrations and trade routes - of global events. Even if we examine, for example, the introduction of French cuisine and cookery techniques in the culinary market we only have to look back to the French Revolution when chefs fled their country carrying with them their skills and traditions all over Europe, including Gibraltar. Evidence of French cuisine surfaces in a number of different ways and it would be interesting to investigate the extent to which French cuisine is embedded in Gibraltar food culture. Class, of course, is another issue that needs to be examined when researching food and culinary habits, but the theory goes that Genoese influences hold the key to what has become recognised as a Gibraltarian food culture, and there is some historical evidence to support this. At the same time, where and how do these Genoese traces surface, and are they more prevalent than, say, elements of Spanish cuisine that would have also been influenced by the spread of Genoese migrations. And what about North African in-
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fluences, present through the early arrival in the eighteenth century of Sephardic Jews from the Barbary Coast to Gibraltar, and the more recent influx from Morocco in the second half of the twentieth century. We enjoy Maltese influences, traces of which could be further dug out, and culinary delights introduced by the Indian community in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Then again, spices were already in use globally, but the opening of the Suez Canal, also known as the Highway to India, in November 1869, connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea and with this came new shipping routes and abundant if not relatively immediate access to ingredients from the Asian continent. And where does good old English cooking come into this very impressive mix? All the more impressive when we realise that other countries enjoy variant although not dissimilar dishes to ours. Indeed, it has been widely suggested that the origins of calentita, a chickpea flour dish similar to the Italian farinata stem from Genoese migrations to Gi-
braltar and the Iberian peninsular, which started before 1704. The chickpea, or garbanzo, the main ingredient in calentita and variations found along the Ligurian Seat is a native of southwest Asia which has been cultivated for over nine thousand years. The kabuli variety, more common in the Middle East and Mediterranean and the type used in calentita, is a larger, creamy yellow legume as opposed to the smaller, dark desi variety. The name chickpea stems from the bean's Latin name, cicer. Interestingly, in the botanical name, Cicer arietinum, the second word means 'ram-like', denoting the bean's resemblance to a ram's head including the curling horns. The chickpea is a key ingredient in Middle Eastern and Indian dishes: hummus is a chickpea spread that is popular in the eastern Mediterranean and can be found globally in local supermarkets. At the same time, chickpeas are the most popular legume in India where they are hulled and split to make chana dal, and ground into flour to make pakoras, papadums and other fried morsels. The chickpea has therefore un-
dergone any number of transformations within different societies and cultures. Other versions of calentita can be found along the Ligurian Sea coast from Nice to Pisa: in France it is referred to as socca, and in Tuscany, cecina. However, a similar dish to calentita in its method and use of chickpea flour is karantita, which is found well beyond the Ligurian Sea, in Algeria. Is there a connection, I wonder, between calentita and karantita - especially when they sound so similar and when we consider the well documented connections established soon after 1704 between Gibraltar and the Barbary Coast to provision the Garrison with food. Gibraltar lost her cultivation grounds, her campo, following the Anglo Dutch action of 1704 and this very fact deprived Gibraltar of her primary source of food production, leading to the importation of food provisions from different parts of the world, in particular from the Barbary Coast. The Seraphic Jews from that area became major food purveyors for the British in Gibraltar - these founding Jews also brought
Calentita has come to signify, or so my theory goes, an important repository not only for Gibraltar's social, culinary and ethnic past, but also a vehicle for present-day articulations of a culturally diverse Gibraltar
with them customs and languages and a food culture. So calentita may not be a so distant relative of karantita, after all, the humble chickpea is a legume that has travelled far and can contribute much to theories of migrations and adaptations. It is nevertheless difficult to determine how or when calentita became known as such, but the terminology is attributed to the fact that the dish was sold in the street by vendors who would shout out caliente, hot, in Spanish, as a means of touting their wares. It has been suggested that the food product, be it farinata or karantita, became associated with the daily cries of caliente to become transformed into calentita, something intrinsically Gibraltarian - and therein lies the key. An interesting aspect here is that we are talking about street food - about a product that is accessible to all, both in terms of cost and visibility, and these elements go some way to suggest why calentita can be considered as a communal food product that cuts across social if not class barriers. It is a very basic commodity - not a more complex, expensive festival type dish - and in this sense, calentita is a unifier. Still, let us not forget the vendor carrying his large pan of calentita on his shoulders, which he would sell a slice at a time, a practice that continued until just after the first half of the twentieth century, rendering his cries and wares very vivid in our collective memory. The fact that so many Gibraltarians still remember the presence of this vendor is crucial to my theory since we do not have to dig deep into our past to draw upon some other cultural signifier to make our own. The fact is that not only are we dealing with an accessible food product, our memory of it is also very accessible, and this, I would suggest, renders calentita a very plausible and seductive symbol of Gibraltar's food culture. We do not have to work too hard at this exercise of cultural recovery, for this is our endeavour when we refer to calentita as our national dish. Neither do we have to invent nor construct it out of nothing. To this end, calentita has undergone further transformations - no longer is the dish merely an inexpensive and handy source of street food of a specific ethnic origin, one which denotes a particular emphasis. Instead, calentita has come to signify, or so my theory goes, an important repository not only for Gibraltar's social, culinary and ethnic past, but also a vehicle for present-day articulations of a culturally diverse Gibraltar.